Heartbreak.

I’ve laid on this bathroom floor many times before. I know this spot all too well. I don’t know why I keep coming back here. 4 years ago I was lying on this bathroom floor in a deep pit of depression. I was so numb I wasn’t even crying. I was wishing to die. I was thinking of how it would all be a lot easier if I would just die. I had nothing to get me up out of this pit and no one knew I was there. All I saw was a literal dark cloud around me. It’s like I was stuck in an in-between death state, purgatory maybe. 

Last year it was after losing my best friend. I laid on this bathroom floor sobbing. It was a full-bodied, gut-wrenching pain. It felt like the harder I cried and the harder I sobbed and the louder I screamed, the more pain that would leave my body. But then after I sobbed and ached and screamed all that I had in me, I got up. Because I had so many things to live for and so many happy things happening in my life that I knew she wanted me to get to- that I wanted to get to for her.

Now I lay back down on this same bathroom floor, this time because of heartbreak. This one is a new kind of pain. I don’t want to die, but I'm also too exhausted to cry. This one feels like I'm wrestling with the universe. Impossible to grieve because I don’t know what I’m grieving. Impossible to accept because there’s hope I can change it, there's hope I can control it. 

Heartbreak is a different kind of grief than losing someone to death. When you lose someone to death, you know the ending. You know that they aren’t coming back and that your mission now is to grieve them. But with heartbreak, there's so much unknown. Will they ever come back? Can I fix this? What did I do wrong? Am I crazy? Was it all a lie? How can I get them back? How can I stop this? Will they find someone else? Will they be with them like they were with me? Will they love them like they loved me? 

Heartbreak hurts so bad because it’s not just a present happiness that’s being taken away, it’s all the future plans and dreams and goals and visions that you had in your head that you were sure would come to be. Heartbreak rips away your dreams and plans and makes you completely at the mercy of the hands of someone else to make those dreams happen. With heartbreak, another person has all of the control. With heartbreak, everything you thought you knew as truth is in question. 

So this time, I get off the bathroom floor again, but not because I feel like I have something I'm excited to be living for, but because I know from experience that I have to do it to save myself. I get myself off of the bathroom floor so that I don't go back to 2020, to the dark cloud. I get off of the bathroom floor because of my loved ones telling me to. I get up confused, and in a foggy haze, but I get up. And I do all the things I've learned to do since 2020, and I look myself in the mirror and tell her “I will not let you go back there again.”